


Making The Most Of It

by Wallwalker



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Character Study, Community: ff_exchange, F/M, Pre-Canon, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-20
Updated: 2010-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-07 10:38:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallwalker/pseuds/Wallwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her marriage might not be the stuff of great songs, but she's grateful for him all the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making The Most Of It

Julia and her husband spent the majority of their time together in a dizzying array of shows, concerts and social events, stopping only occasionally to spend as many moments together as they could manage.

She was trying to make the most of their time together, because she knew that her husband was going to have to leave her eventually. Sooner or later their beloved dictator, as Issac called him when no one was listening, was going to tell his top general that he needed him to go and establish Galbadia's dominance over another country, and her husband was going to swallow his personal feelings about the matter and go. He would hate leaving, but he would go, because he knew that he could do more to reign in the President's mad notions as a free man and a trusted advisor than he could as another nameless political prisoner. He would go, leaving his beautiful young wife behind to write songs about her pride in her husband, her hopes for his safe return and her fears of losing him. Then her agent would only let her submit the ones about pride and hope to the company that publishes her records, and then possibly release the songs about fear underground under a different name to protect her career. She might not end up being in immediate physical danger, because no one would want to cross her husband, but the government could still censor or even outlaw her music, and there's not much a musician can do if no one will listen to her or buy her songs.

Either way, that was all in the future, although she knew enough about politics to know that it isn't as far off as she'd like it to be. Her husband was with her at that moment, and he seemed as aware of the danger of being taken away as she was, and so they spent as much time together as they could - going to shows, stealing moments before her concerts, spending their nights away from his mansion in luxurious hotels. He might not be as romantic as some - it is hard for men as practical as Issac to be romantic - but he tried his best to make her happy, and most of the time he succeeded at making all of their dates as memorable as he can.

Maybe that was why she always fell for soldiers, Julia sometimes would say to herself when she was lying awake in his arms. Maybe she needed that uncertainty, that knowledge that any given evening might be their last. She couldn't imagine living a normal life now, with a man who'd never have to be sent away to some distant country, a man who could live his entire life sitting and watching television if he felt like it. There wouldn't have been any music in a life like that, nothing worth writing songs about.

Julia had written songs about Issac before. A few of them had been successful, had made her famous enough and wealthy enough not to have to worry about some of the more mundane problems of living in Galbadia. Her life was easy, especially since her husband's status had taken care of some of the others, the censorship and constant supervision that so many other artists in Deling City had to endure. Sometimes she feels guilty about that, but most of the time she has to admit that she's grateful.

Still, despite their success, she had never written anything with as much "widespread, visceral appeal" as Eyes on Me. That was what the critics had said about the song, that it spoke to everyone who heard it who had ever loved - old or young, man or woman, rich or poor. That everyone could relate to the feeling of having seen someone across the room that they couldn't take their eyes off of, and hoping that their special someone felt the same way. Her publisher and her agent were both constantly hinting that she should write something like it again, that everyone was waiting for another hit of that caliber. Sometimes they crossed the line into warnings, played on her worries of becoming the last great thing if she didn't give the public what they were expecting from her.

What was she supposed to do? None of them knew how difficult it had been writing Eyes on Me. None of them could know; she'd hidden that part of her life particularly well, had avoided the question in every interview, because the memory of it was terribly painful to her. She hated talking about how it had felt, waiting for so long for that young soldier to come back to her, and the slow realization that he must have died out there and that she'd never see him again. She'd always been something of a dreamer, and she'd believed that romance could blossom in the strangest places; part of her had hoped that she'd been right, that somehow her affection would be able to protect him. It had been something of a blow, realizing that she'd been wrong.

She couldn't go through that again. She wasn't going to go through those tears, those horrible long nights. Her life as the wife of General Issac Caraway was not as dramatic as her love affair with that young soldier whose name she remembered most of the time and who she did her best not to dwell on these days, but it was calmer, more stable. He was a good man, she told herself, even if he wasn't one of the world's great romantics. He was gruff at times, when he wasn't putting on a show for society, and she could tell by the distance in his eyes that he'd seen terrible things that he'd probably never tell her about, but he always did his best to treat her well, and he told her that he loved her every night before they went to sleep. There might not be as much fiery passion to it as there had been between the star-crossed lovers that she'd sang about in Eyes on Me, but it was soothing, comforting. It was safe. Maybe she'd given up something beautiful in exchange for her safety. Maybe she knew that what she perceived as stability was an illusion - he might be a high-ranking soldier, but he was still a soldier, after all, and soldiers went off to war sooner or later. But none of that changed anything. She'd made her choice, and she wasn't going to back out on it now.

Especially not now, when she could feel his baby start to shift in her womb. She had grown up with a loving, supportive mother and father, and they had done everything they could for her; she wasn't going to let this child live any other way, no matter what she had to do. This baby - she didn't know what it was going to be, and in truth she didn't really want to find out, although she supposed that she'd find out soon enough for her husband's sake - was going to be loved and cared for. Julia was going to be a good mother, and Issac was going to be a strong, stern, but loving father.

She'd do everything in her power to make sure of it.

**Author's Note:**

> A vignette - I'm quite fond of this relationship in the game, even though this fic does turn out to be rather cruelly ironic, considering what happens. I gave General Caraway a first name (Issac) since as far as I know he doesn't have a canon first name anywhere; please correct me if I'm wrong!


End file.
